In the 1820s and 30s con man Gregor MacGregor claimed to be the "Cazique of Poyais", basically the king of a thriving colony/country in central America that in no way existed. Investments in the entirely fictional country skyrocketed because of its vast amount of made up natural resources and its population of make believe servile and pleasant natives. MacGregor even convinced a few hundred Anglos to move to Poyais, gave them fancy titles in the military and civil service of his pretend country and then put them on ships to central America where they were dropped off in an uninhabitable jungle that MacGregor had no claim to whatsoever and then most of them died.

Cw: animal abuse

If someone was trying to sell an old or sick horse and pass it off as younger or healthier they'd cut the skin off a finger of ginger and put it in the horse's butt. The burning and discomfort would make the agitated horse seem more active and energetic than it really was.

I don't know how you could relate that to bitcoin but they are both scams.

dutch tulip mania?

Yeah, its called the South Sea Bubble

Nah, I think bitcoin deserves credit for being a new type of scam. It's not a pyramid scheme or Ponzi scheme or multi-level-marketting scheme. It's most similar to a series of pump and dump scams, but it's more different from those than pyramid schemes are from MLMs, which get separate names.

Company scrip is the closest I can think of, but it lacks the gambling component. It's funny money with arbitrary value that can only be spent in a controlled and exploitative pseudo-economy. There are no currency protections, you can't put it in a real bank or use it outside of places designed to steal from you, it's backed by nothing but the promise of the thief.

I do think bitcoin is kind of un-heralded. A massively multiplayer online form of gambling but instead of being a boring ordinary casino game where there is some normal distribution of payouts that gives the house an edge, there are exponential movements driven by crowd psychology and the whims of wealthy people. The game is to keep holding through those exponential movements but also know when to get out before the big -95% crash. Penny stocks pioneered this game mechanic but they lack worldwide 24/7 play without any barriers to entry.

Then much like casino games have an Egypt theme or whatever, cryptocurrency has the theme of libertarian “sound money” ideology usually associated with boomer gold bugs. Although a lot of coins are just associated with various memes.

Also due to its nature anybody can develop & publish their own “game” for immediate worldwide release, with whatever whacky rules they want. Like 10% of all transactions are skimmed into a pot that you can do some other bullshit to compete to get.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)

Not a perfect analog but still. Crypto exchanges have many similarities with these.

Walt disney when the animators try to unionize the first time

There was an old scam done by like a old head of the treasury of Brittany. I forgot the exact details but a guy named Walpol did a ponzi scheme for a big trade ship expiation. The scam got big enough the British government bought him out so the economy didn't crash. Like, it got way bigger than the a shipping run could ever be and people were just trading futures in a giant bubble to the point where it was a large fraction of the entire GDP. From what I recall everyone kinda found out about it but because he was upper class they all laughed it off. I just remember that after he got away with it someone interviewed him and he said he was retiring but he wasn't ever going to read a history book again. He said that having made history and seeing what is written about it he realized the histories are all bullshit. Which I feel like is kinda based for a man in like the eighteenth century or whenever

The Mississippi Company was something like bitcoin. John Law basically invented fractional reserve banking by assuming the national debt in exchange for the right to print paper notes backed by France and exclusive trade rights to the Americas. The whole thing blew up because there was no mechanism to stop inflation, investors could buy an unlimited amount of shares of a finite investment.

Tulips.

Ever heard of the Mississippi Company?

If the value of your investment is stored in land, the land can never be destroyed, and that means your investment is fully secure.

https://youtu.be/cZslebJEZbE

Isn't analog Bitcoin just coins?